Thursday, October 30, 2014

Just in time for Halloween, a new Scott Walker record. Not just
Walker—a 71-year-old man who sings like he’s in a haunted house, his records
full of atonal music and industrial sounds and general discomfort—but here he’s
teamed up with droning avant-garde metal band Sunn O))). To some ears, it’s
surely a match made in hell. Should you choose to blast it from your windows on
Oct. 31, it’s guaranteed to terrify the neighbourhood children.

Yet as latter-day Scott Walker records go—he’s been on an
increasingly strange trip since the 1980s, after starting out as a teen pop
idol in the 1960s and a respected torch singer in the 1970s—Soused is
relatively accessible. Sunn O))) are a grounding presence; even though it
doesn’t sound like they’re doing much other than playing the longest, loudest
guitar chords in history, they provide a valuable anchor for Walker’s melodies.
They’re the railroad track that keeps you tethered as you travel through
Walker’s house of horrors, where odd sounds creep out of the shadows, the light
shifts subtly throughout, and Walker jumps in front of you every so often to
assure you that there are “no raindrops on roses / no whiskers on kittens” and
sing choruses about a woman who has “hidden her babies away” and perhaps break
into an Iroquois children’s lullaby while he’s at it.

When Walker released the 2012 album Bisch Bosch, I wrote: “Walker does not make
music for you to enjoy; he makes music for you to endure ... He arranges
unusual sounds and aural colours in ways most musicians could never imagine,
rendering every other rock artist claiming to be avant-garde exposed as a timid
poseur.”

That’s still true, which is why it’s weird that Sunn O))), of
all people, turned out to be the collaborators that pulled Walker back from the
brink. Sometimes a few guitars is all it takes.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Today Brent
Bambury was sent to mop up the mess at CBC’s Q, to be the public face of the
show for the first episode of its future following a devastating weekend.

I’ve long
thought that the wide-ranging cultural curiosity built into the Q structure was
modelled on a (considerably) more mainstream version of Bambury’s first radio show, Brave New Waves—right down to the opening monologue. Bambury always
opened his show with a quip, an observation, a commentary; it might have been a
sentence, it might have been several paragraphs. (It didn’t rhyme.) It was one
of my many favourite things about the program. For that reason, and others,
Bambury has always been an ideal Q host; props also to Piya
Chattopadhyay—here’s hoping one of them gets the gig. (I have a crazy hunch it
won’t go to a man.)

Brave New
Waveschanged my life, with Bambury at the mic, 1985-1995. Of course, it wasn’t
just he who changed my life: it was everyone who worked on the program and made
it what it was. It wasn’t until I became a professional broadcaster that I
fully realized that. We all hear the host; we don’t all hear the people behind
him pitching ideas, researching his questions, writing his scripts (including the opening essays). Some radio
hosts—not going to name any names here—are nowhere near as quick-witted and
sharp when they attempt to freestyle without a script and prepared notes in
front of them. A great radio show will survive the cult of celebrity.

One of the
best things Bambury did during his the opening salvo today, other than
acknowledging that the staff and the listeners are the true heart of the
program? He didn’t conclude with a cutesy rhyme. The future doesn’t always
rhyme. The truth doesn’t follow a tempo. There are always bumps ahead.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Ever since gay marriage vaulted queer issues into the
mainstream, pop music has responded, if at all, with earnest platitudes (see: “Born
This Way,” "Same Love"). Few musicians, if any, have used their art to suggest just how subversive
queer culture was and is, how dangerous it is to embrace supposed
“flamboyance,” the marginalization that exists outside of mainstream
assimilation.

Then along comes a guy who calls himself Perfume Genius, with a
song called “Queen,” with a chorus that baits: “No family is safe / when I
sashay.” This man does not want a peaceful life in the suburbs and settling for
tolerance rather than acceptance. He’s a queer Stagger Lee, a homophobe’s worst
nightmare, “casing the barracks / for an ass to break and harness / into the
fold / marry.” And he does so with a voice that struts and seethes, staring
down death and disease and contempt, backed by a sparse and gutsy rhythm
section that crafts majesty out of a bare minimum of notes.

Perfume Genius is 32-year-old Mike Hadreas of Seattle; this is
his third album, but his first working with a full band. Producers John Parish
(PJ Harvey) and Adrian Utley (Portishead) know when to leave Hadreas and his
piano ballads alone, and exactly when to inject the appropriate bombast, glam
rock and occasional steps into operatic avant-garde. He told Rolling Stone that he’s “trying to use whatever
it is that makes people uncomfortable around me as a sort of power over
them." It works.

“Fool” spends its first minute in a finger-snapping,
pseudo-Motown groove before breaking down into a delicate dirge of operatic
beauty that suspends the song for a full 90 seconds; the initial groove then
returns with even more swagger. “Grid” is a two-chord synth blues, with Hadreas’s
voice drenched in rockabilly reverb a la Suicide’s Alan Vega, with a chorus of
screaming women in the background; someone considered it commercial enough to
be the second single from the album (with accompanying bizarro video).

Too Bright is too short; it’s
just over half an hour long. No complaints, however: it’s thoroughly
satisfying, blending traditional songcraft—some songs here could easily be
tackled by ’50s torch singers—and performance art in ways that precious few
ever have done so successfully. His voice and piano playing are inherently
gorgeous, yet he relishes dissonance and ugliness, perhaps to cast his brighter
side in starker relief. Perhaps because this man is anything but
one-dimensional.

Aphex Twin, a.k.a. Richard D. James: the enfant terrible of ’90s
electronic music, the game-changer, the mad genius, the magical misanthrope,
the man who made Radiohead’s Thom Yorke want to burn guitars. He’s been largely
laying low for the past 13 years, living in a Scottish hamlet and raising two
children. Apparently he’s kept busy, building robots in his backyard and making
a lot of music that only now is seeing the light of day. Naturally, his legions
of fans are ecstatic to see him return. What about the rest of us?

I’ve never cared for Aphex Twin in the past. Yet I love this
album. Has he changed—or have I? (We’re the same age.) It’s natural for an
innovator to sound benign two decades after first turning tables (or
turntables). It’s entirely possible that Aphex Twin’s influence—digitally
deconstructed beats and tones that can sound randomly generated to the
untrained ear—is so far-reaching that we now take it for granted. (His ambient
work, on the other hand, not heard on Syro, is a direct extension of Brian Eno’s
early ’80s records.) The avant-garde of electronic music today is still
catching up to what Aphex Twin was doing in the late ’90s. EDM owes James an
enormous debt (see: Skrillex), even if it takes the most obvious aspects of his
work set to punishing disco beats. Meanwhile, mainstream pop has become
stranger and stranger, to the point where it’s not hard to hear the evil sonic
sorcery of James at work there as well.

Squiggly bass, spasmodic rhythms, melodies as fleeting as jazz
improvisations, played on alternately soft and distorted synthesizers—Aphex
Twin weaves various discombobulated layers together to make something dense yet
danceable, distant yet strangely seductive, despite the fact that it’s near
impossible to detect a human hand at work anywhere here. The tracks are
apparently named after some of the gear he uses, decibel levels he recorded at,
or what seem like gobbledygook file names (or intentionally unintelligible
passwords).

It’s tempting to wonder—especially when some ’90s jungle breaks
surface, in mutated form—if James just dusted off some unreleased files from
his heyday and passed them off as a new album; something his contemporary Plug
did a couple of years back. But the tracks on Syro display a maturity, a
confidence in which James doesn’t feel like he has to prove anything to anyone
or even himself. There’s no need to be oppositional for the sake of it; there’s
no envelope to consciously push against. Left on his own, in that small
Scottish village, the mad musical mind of Richard D. James doesn’t have to
compete with the noise of the world. He’s already changed the face of music;
now he can sit back and enjoy it. So can we—some of us, for the first time.

Matthew Sweet, a great songwriter better known as a one-hit
wonder (“Girlfriend”) in the ’90s, once said that your dumbest song will be
your biggest hit. Randy Newman (“Short People”) would agree. So would Chuck
Berry: the rock’n’roll legend’s only No. 1 hit was not “Johnny B. Goode” or “Roll
Over Beethoven”—but “My Ding-a-Ling.”

Buck 65 might be the next to join this list. Despite over 20
years making left-of-centre hip-hop—which occasionally borrowed from country
music, prog rock and David Lynch soundtracks—he’s never had a commercial hit. A
divorce album—which Neverlove is—seems like an odd gamble for success.

Yet here he is with “Super Pretty Naughty,” surely the greatest
single of 2014, equally hideous and hilarious and an all-too-perfect send-up of
Swedish techno pop that pushes all the right buttons, complete with the
decadent chorus: “I wanna get dressed up, get sexed up and cake on my
birthday!” What seems like a nonsensical party song sneaks in self-aware lines
(“I wanna sell my perfect life”) and perhaps even a nod to Chuck Berry’s
biggest hit (“Ding-a-ling! Sugar snack!”). And the video—well, that just needs
to be seen to be believed. Let’s just say that it involves lasers shooting out
of his groin. It’s merely a few punchlines short of a Flight of the Concords
sketch.

What’s this song doing on a divorce album? Buck 65 says he wrote
it during one of his lowest moments of his life: he wanted to write the most
insanely happy song imaginable in a genre of music he didn’t understand. Mission
accomplished.

The rest of Neverlove bears zero resemblance to "Super Pretty
Naughty," which will surely baffle anyone discovering Buck 65 for the first time
should the single blow up. It’s not exactly clear who this album is for: the
glossy pop moments—like the Alicia Keys-ish “Heart of Stone,” or “Only War,”
which could be a Katy Perry ballad—stand in stark contrast to opening track “Gates
of Hell,” about a suicide attempt and featuring a death metal scream in the
chorus, or the delicacy of the hushed “Baby Blanket.” Somewhere in between, “Je
T’Aime Mon Amour” or the bouncy “Love Will Fuck You Up,” capture what Buck 65
does best, straddling genres and eras, his gruff, hobo beatnik persona
delivering densely layered and playful rhyme schemes. When he raps over a
flamenco-tinged 6/4 rhythm powered by handclaps, it’s exactly the kind of
exploratory trickery we’d expect from him: “Music you can feel, but also taste
and smell.”

Every track here features female vocals, acting as a foil to
what could be a divorcé’s pity party—especially when he tells us: “When my baby
left me, I cried for an entire year.” It’s not an angry, bitter album; it’s
reflective, probing, yet hardly a downer. It’s not at all mired in
specifics—nor does it name any names (pay attention, Robin Thicke). It is, of
course, inherently flawed and bipolar. It’s confounding and creative,
gloriously messy and mixed-up—like any one of us would be after an emotionally
volatile time.

If the sugar rush of the single draws you in the door, Buck 65
would like to show you some of the darker corners of his empty house as well.